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LOS ANGELES — Apps to improve photos are among the most used by smartphone users. Here's a look at a photo app that focuses on an important need often neglected: facial retouching.

Facetune ($3.99, Apple) takes the simple tools used in big computer programs like Photoshop — skin softening, teeth brightening and removing circles from eyes — and brings them to the masses.

The world's most popular photo app, Instagram, and others like it have filters to pretty up an image, with black and white, sepia and other moody looks.

But since we tend to take many more images of our friends than landscapes, focusing on facial retouching makes a lot of sense and is highly useful.

I took a picture of my friend Liz, for instance, opened it in Facetune, and with a few simple swipes, used the skin soften feature to wipe out some facial lines.

If I wanted to go to the extreme, I could have used the "reshape" tool to make another friend a little thinner (it's called "Liquify" in Photoshop) — the sort of stuff done in fashion magazines all the time. And those are just two of the options.

Facetune has been out for the iPhone since March and recently added an iPad app as well. Both have been at the top of Apple app charts.

I prefer the iPad app to the iPhone version, only because when you're dealing with photos, larger is always better. And on the phone, it's hard to see the labels for the various tools.

For mobile, there are so many photo apps it's hard to keep track. But again, most deal with everything but facial features. And let's face it — with more and more of us taking the majority of our photos on the phone, for all those selfies and group photos, we need more apps like Facetune.